Curriculum

Curriculum

An Introduction to the Gateway Curriculum

Our school curriculum meets the unique needs of our high service population with a heavy focus on ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, starting and ending each year with a topic focused on transition, developing a sense of community and belonging whilst understanding children’s different roots and heritage. Topics, which span school breaks, allow our military families to further explore their learning ‘back home’ with extended family during holidays, further enhancing their overall learning.Through a two-year cycle of whole school, wide arching topics such as 'We are Conservationists' we offer a wider world to our pupils, allowing siblings and families to experience learning together, sharing their linked understanding. Curriculum enrichment through trips, events and visitors ensures children have memorable experiences to help them remember more over time and the recurrent nature of the curriculum allows children to further build on prior knowledge, securing a deeper, broader understanding. We are proud of the engaging texts selected which supplement our topic areas to generate quality reading and writing outcomes, linked to topics, throughout the school. Our pupils enjoy their lessons and are always eager to tell visitors about the things they have learnt.

Below you will find detailed explanations of how each subject area is taught and the progression expected over time. You will also find the phase stage topic webs and long term plans.

Gateway Primary School – Curriculum Intent

The curriculum at Gateway Primary School is bespoke for our children because it:

Builds on a sense of belonging and community, developing children’s roots – firstly within a classroom, throughout our school and then within the wider community, helping children form a sense of where they are from.

Enhances our children’s understanding of opportunities within and beyond a military lifestyle - linking historical and current issues of interest to our children and their families.

Creates links between school and home – families learn together and share their discoveries, creating a love of learning.

Embraces a whole school topic approach, learning as a community, celebrating and sharing successes together.

Offers rich, hands on experiences through trips and visitors, making school a place they want to be, all day every day.

Invests in our children’s unique starting points, culture capital and out of school interests, developing a true sense of each individual child, fundamental to building strong relationships.

Develops the emotional skills to thrive in a society with lots of transition, learning to welcome new members, embracing our strengths and differences, as well as compassionately saying goodbye and engaging in change and progress.

Building a sense of community.

Developing a love of learning.

Sharing success.

Phase Groups Topics

Subjects

For any further information on the curriculum, please speak to our Curriculum Lead, Mrs Nicki Scovell.

All aspects of our curriculum are accessible to all children, irrespective of their ethnic background, gender, disability, religious or linguistic background, inline with the Equality Act 2010. We strive hard to meet the needs of those pupils with special educational needs, those with disabilities, those who are more able, those with special gifts and talents and the children who are learning English as an additional language, inline with The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Regulations 2014. We provide a ruch, challenging curriculum, which stretches all of our children. Staff are aware of children who have exceptional talents and gifts and monitor or track their progress carefully to ensure their academic potential or talent is continually developed.

Assessment

High quality teaching is supported and informed by high quality assessment. The school ethos promotes and emphasises the opportunity for all children to succeed when taught and assessed effectively. Assessment is used to focus on monitoring and supporting children’s progress, attainment, and wider outcomes. Assessment is used to support informative and productive conversations between staff, children and parents. Children are encouraged to reflect on their own progress, understand their strengths and identify what they need to do to improve. Assessment is inclusive of all abilities. At Gateway Primary School we see assessment as an integral part of teaching and learning, and it is inextricably linked to our curriculum.

We use three broad overarching forms of assessment:

day-to-day in-school formative assessment,
in-school summative assessment and
nationally standardised summative assessment.

At Gateway, we use Sonar: an online tool for assessment. All objectives taught, for all subjects are assessed and individual pupil profiles are generated over time, assessing success in each subject against known end points for each phase group. This allows teachers to accurately plan for next steps and ensure continued progress. This assessment tool also allows us to moderate outcomes across phases, and allow subject leaders to ensure the coverage of knowledge of subjects progresses across the year groups.